the first time I ever really understood the power of visuals was the same night that I knew I loved the girl I loved it was our second date and after taking me through this twisting odyssey of the back streets of Seoul she took me to a set of dark and dingy stairs and at the bottom of these stairs was a bar but before I could get into this bar there was a large green door it was a large steel green door and it had on it one of those kind of latches you know the ones
are big enough just about to open two eyeballs can look through maybe past something like in a prison movie I knocked on the door the latch opens how many two waiting and then after three four maybe five minutes the door Julie opens and inside is the most wondrous scene a 22 year old boy could ever hope to see faces faces of all ages and races dancing dancing on the dance floor dancing on the tables dancing on the chairs dancing on the bar and the amazing woman that had brought me to this place took me by
the hand and led me out onto the dance floor but she kept going past the dance floor past the bar straight to the DJ booth and she picked up from one of those small little pots that's next to the DJ a singular Sharpie pen are we going to be doing music requests yeah but first let's leave a memory that we were here so what she did is she started on the table in front of us to draw I mean it was a very simple doodle a line drawing but for some reason the image and I
still can't understand to this day why she did it the image that she decided to draw News was me I mean it was undeniably me it had my hair at the time my glasses at the time my chin I mean there was no way that I could plausibly deny that the person that she was drawing was me and after she was finished with her artwork she handed me the pen and she said it's your turn what an incredibly pressurized situation to put a 22 year old boy under a 22 year old boy who at that
time is only influenced by two things hormones and alcohol my mind races and flashes back to when I was 14 in our class and I remembered nothing because I didn't pay attention when I was 14 in our class the smart kids in art class did their history homework but I did remember one thing her MSN Messenger avatar remember Emma Stone messenger no okay her avatar was lazy cat 0 1 1 7 so given this set of circumstances I did the only thing I could I drew a generic picture of a cat there you can see
it it's three circles three triangles and six or seven lines now fortunately for me she found this funny she laughed and really really luckily in that moment the image that I drew said more about me than my words ever could have and more importantly the image that she drew showed me how she saw me what the two of us had done in this moment is shown just a little bit of visual creativity by getting the right image at the right time we had had a strong emotional effect on each other little did I know that
night that this combination of right image at the right moment would have a huge effect on my career over a decade later I'm still with that stay same amazing woman and I've left behind a career as a technical writer I literally proof read manuals for toilets and I now lead a team that builds visuals for some of the largest stages in the world stages where the right visual at the right moment helps an idea flourish and take off it's an amazing opportunity that I've been afforded but it's been while trying to execute on this opportunity
that I've come across a concern you see we as a people are obsessed with the literacy rate politician after politician stretching all the way back to the 1980s has held up the literacy rate is some kind of indication of their success but what about visual literacy what about learning how to read and write images where are the mass teaching programs for visual literacy google the term and you will find underneath the Wikipedia entry one page buried on the Toledo Museum of Art website and while institutions like the Toledo Museum of Art are fantastic spaces where
we can learn about the knowledge and the power of images attendance at institutions like these has been steadily falling for the last 20 years across the US and most of Europe meanwhile the world that we live in today is more visual than ever before yesterday 95 million images were uploaded to Instagram earth burned down Silicon Valley the biggest companies and the brightest minds are engaged in a battle for your attention and they know that the way to win this battle is visual you see it's all to do with how your brain works believe it or
not you are built to see the world visually thirty percent of your brain is dedicated to deciphering images that's larger than any other segment it's why cavemen did cave paintings it's why road signs are not written out in text studies show that my chances of you remembering the stuff that I'm saying today increases by as much as 50% if I can get right visual with the right message and it's this combination of right visual right time right message that people are already using to manipulate you they using it to get you to do things what
things take for example Netflix a company so successful that they practically invented the concept of binge watching binge watching something the folks at Netflix can affect how much of a series you will watch based purely off of the first image that they use when you browse through the browsing experience they've gotten so good at doing this that they can adjust for your age your gender your location your cultural even your racial identity huh so what who cares what's the worst thing that's going to happen they're going to make me watch the Adam Sandler movie for
30 minutes it's a disaster but it's not really the end of the world what if I told you that the folks at Netflix had found that the things that influence your decisions of how much of a series you're going to watch are things like faces and the expressions on those faces and whether or not those faces belong to people who are portraying actors who are portraying villains or heroes I would say that if a facial expression or an archetype or even stereotyped or stereotypical role is affecting how we consume something it's affecting how we see
the world and this combination of right image right time right visual is affecting more than just how you consume popular culture in 2010 Facebook carried out an experiment for the congressional elections and they found that by accompanying messages like this one designed to provoke you to go out and vote by adding in images of your friends they were able to inspire more than 340 thousand people to go out and vote who otherwise would not have voted the result of the 2010 congressional elections the biggest swing in seat since the 1930s Facebook admits that in 2016
over 10 million people were exposed to images like this one the power that these images are happening is not purely down to the visual but we can clearly see that the right image at the right time or the wrong image at the right time can literally change the world the good news and there is good news the good news is that you can effect a change people are already affecting a change take for example Getty Images this is the single biggest library for images that people use in things like websites newspapers publications anything for commercial
use and these images that you can see along the bottom of the screen is a timeline each one of these is the most popular image in their library for the search term woman this is the most popular image from 2007 moving along to 2009 you can see that we're going further and further along until we get to 2007 teens image remember these are the most popular results for the search term woman notice the portrayal we've gone from a woman being someone who lies placidly on a massage table draped in nothing but a towel to someone
striding across a landscape fully clothed she even has a hat on the truly amazing thing about this is this is not purely a reflection of the change in demand getti were able to effect this change by doing things like partnering with sheryl sandberg and creating things like the leaning collection and what they did by changing the by changing the supply they were able to change the demand by creating better pictures that portrayed women in a better way they were able to change the pictures that we used and consumed remember it's worked these are the most
popular images for those search terms they affected a change it's a change that you can duplicate in your own lives but where do we start David there's no huge mass learning program for images I don't know as much as Getty Images now how am I supposed to do that well I believe that the secret for how we get better at visual literacy is the same as how we traditionally thought about getting better a conventional literacy how do you get better with words you read more you start by reading so let's start by reading let's go
to art galleries and exhibitions it's bad enough that attendance at these places is falling for the last two decades what's even worse astha tist 'ok so that the amount of time you spend on each image is as low as 17 seconds so let's not just spend more time appreciating images let's spend a lot more time appreciating images I know that it's not just down to you we need the gallery exhibitors curators and owners to improve what they're doing so if you're listening out there do it the last time I went to a major Museum of
Art the adult tour was so pretentious that I switched my audio guide to the kids one and I had a wonderful time why because the art was explained to me in simple terms I'm a technical writer remember simple terms that I could understand and with genuine heartfelt enthusiasm then once you've taken the time to go out and read more visuals it's time to write more visuals stop outsourcing the creation of your images to others where to start well Millennials you could start here did you know Millennials in the room that in your lifetime you are
statistically speaking going to take 25700 selfies in the last 12 months I'm a millennial too in the last 12 months we have spent 52 hours getting ready to take selfies that's not sending the selfie that's not editing the selfie that's preparing to take it so if we're going to spend that much time why not spend a little bit more of that time not just thinking does my hair look good this is the right angle for my beautiful bone structure and thinking about how does this image portray me how does this image portray the other people
in the picture how do I want the people who are looking at this to feel the second place where you can spark your visual creativity is emojis this is the first ever set of emojis created in 1999 four pages remember pages me Nina today there are over 300 300 emojis in popular use you know what I love about emojis they help us overcome boundaries take for example the boundary of language my sister-in-law's English is terrible my Korean is not a lot better but thanks to emojis we can have a genuine heartfelt warm goodbye this is
a genuine transcript of a conversation we had the last time I went to see her in Korea and she dropped me off at the airport and then I went through customs the truly wonderful thing about emojis is that the library expands it expands based off of your usage of them the more you use an emoji the more likely it is to stay in the library and the more likely similar emojis are to come into the library it's how we've ended up with emojis like this one the last place where I challenge you to spark your
visual creativity is memes memes are awesome they're an awesome way they're like a gateway drug into visual creativity why because they're easy someone else provides the image you just add the message and the timing meme generators are free to download and you can start anywhere start with your friends Facebook feeds I do it to them all the time they hate me for it but it's good for my visual creativity but before you dismiss memes it's just coincidentally not important all right they're funny but what are they gonna do to the world consider this this is
a meme this is a meme that cost people their lives this is a meme that saved lives now I can't guarantee you that by going out into the world and producing your own images you're gonna be any more successful either financially socially however you want to measure your success but I can say with a fair degree of certainty that you're going to be better placed at interpreting the images that are put in front of you why they're there why that time why that face why that portrayal of someone and how is it that the person
who put that message there wants me to feel so do it go out make your own images images are important too important to outsource the creation of them to other people and to effective and powerful to consume them without due care and attention your world is getting more visual by the day and you have a say in how it's going to look thank you [Applause]
